Rite of Passage
by ParallelVerse
Summary: 18 yearold Dean thinks it is time his 14 yearold brother got drunk for the first time, under his supervision, of course. It's part of the big brother job description. Rated T for language and, well, underage drinking.


A/N: Getting my feet wet here with a teen!chester oneshot based on something that happened to me in college. My second date with a guy I dated for a little while consisted of us taking his 14 year-old brother out to get drunk for the first time. The guy's parents had just divorced and he was very protective of his younger siblings. Remembering it recently, I thought is seemed like a very Dean thing to do. Since I cannot, alas, write humor very well, I had the thought to hook it up with a favorite scene from an S2 episode, so mild spoilers for Playthings (more like a teaser, actually). Mostly Sam's POV. The story doesn't amount to much, but it satisfied an urge. Any and all comments welcomed.

Standard disclaimer: Kripke and the CW own the characters. The characters own me.

Rite of Passage

Fourteen year old Sam Winchester sat against the headboard of his bed concentrating on the book propped on his knees. Occasionally, he peeled an index card off a diminishing stack on the bedside table to his left, scribbled a few lines on it and added it to a growing stack on the bed to his right. The small and somewhat dingy room was beginning to darken as the day fell away, and Sam reached over absently to snap on the lamp beside the bed.

The apartment was unusually quiet this Friday evening. Dad was away and would be for the whole weekend. Not on a hunt, for a change, but consulting with a friend who had come into possession of some books and manuscripts John thought might contain some useful intelligence about supernatural creatures and the means of detecting and defeating them. (John tended to think in those terms thanks to his military background, even when the object at hand was some ancient, arcane text.)

Sam had to admit to himself, a little guiltily, that his father's absence was a relief. Had he been home, a good bit of the weekend would probably have been taken up with training of one sort or another. That wasn't so bad in itself, had been a part of his life for so long he was used to it. But the more time he spent in his father's company, the greater the chance that the two of them would butt heads over something. Over the past year or so, the fights had become more frequent and more intense, often leaving Sam frustrated and depressed. Dad just refused to accept that Sam might want something for himself other than the life of a hunter.

Well, Sam's way out as he saw it was school. If he did well enough in high school to score a scholarship, he could go to college, which would give him some choice and some control over his own life. Of course, he hadn't brought up the possibility of college with his father, and he wouldn't until and unless it was a done deal. Happily, that dreaded confrontation was some years in the future. In the meantime, though, he had to get the grades, which was why he was holed up in his room on a Friday evening working on a report for extra credit in history. Now if the other potential source of chaos in the household would just remain at bay for a while longer…

The thought might as well have been an incantation as the bedroom door flew open to admit the force of nature that was Sam's older brother Dean.

"Hey, Sammy," the older boy said cheerfully. Dean's face was shiny with sweat and streaked with grease, and his clothes weren't in much better shape after spending most of the time since he got home from school working on his precious car. He peeled his t-shirt off and made a show of sniffing it and making a disgusted face.

"Whew, now that's what I call ripe," he said. He wadded up the shirt and tossed it at Sam's head. "What d'ya think?"

Sam deflected the shirt away from his face with a frown. "Cut it out, Dean," he groused. "Leave me alone, I'm trying to read."

"Nope. Sorry, Sammy." Dean skirted around the end of his bed and made a grab for Sam's book, snapping it up before Sam could stop him. "No more homework tonight, Poindexter. It's Friday night and I've got big plans for us."

"What plans?" Sam snarled, trying to wrest the book away from his big brother. "I thought you were going out with Dia tonight."

Dean danced away from Sam's reach with the book held high. Sam briefly considered going after it, but decided he'd rather not grapple with Dean in his current state.

"I am," Dean acknowledged, grinning. "And you're coming with."

"What?" Sam squawked. "Dean, what are you talking about?"

"This is your big night, little brother," Dean said. "Tonight we're gonna get you drunk.."

"Drunk?" Sam couldn't believe he had heard right.

"Yeah, man. Drunk, soused, wasted. You know. Hell, I was younger than you when I got drunk the first time."

"But Dean," Sam protested. "I don't want to get drunk."

"Sure you do. Come on, dude, it's, like, a rite of passage. You want to grow up to be a man, don't you?

"Getting drunk is what makes you a man?"

"Yeah…well, okay, no," Dean admitted. He sighed and ran his hand down the back of his head, a habit Sam knew meant _Dean thinking something through_.

"Look, Sam," he went on. "One of these days, it's going to come up. Okay? And I don't want to see it happen when you're hanging out with some dumbass kids who don't know what the fuck they're doing and end up getting you thrown in jail or bashed up in a car wreck or something. If it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen with me so I can keep you out of trouble." He grinned and dropped the serious tone. "No need to thank me. It's in the big brother job description."

Bemused, Sam thought, keep me _out_ of trouble? Sometimes—okay, a lot of the time—the way his brother's mind worked was a total mystery to him. "But why does it have to be now?" Sam argued. "I've got this report to do for history and…"

"We may never get a better chance than this, chief" Dean interrupted. "Dad's gone. Dia's aunt and uncle went out of town and left her the key to their place so she can feed the plants and water the cat, or whatever, which gives us a place to hang out besides this dump. And Dia's legal, which means she can buy the booze for us. It's like it was totally meant to be, man."

Sam opened his mouth to respond, but Dean rolled right on over him. "Look, Sammy, you'll have the rest of the weekend to do your homework. I won't even make you go target shooting with me, and I'll tell Dad you did. What d'ya say?"

That stopped Sam in his tracks. Dean actually offering to lie to their Dad? That was huge. Dean practically worshipped the ground their father walked on and would do almost anything to gain his approval. Unlike Sam, he had embraced the hunting life whole-heartedly and gave Dad the instant and unquestioning obedience the man demanded without complaint.

Of course, one of those demands was that Dean take care of his little brother. "Watch out for Sammy" had been John Winchester's first and most often repeated order. Maybe Dad should have been careful what he asked for, because Dean never did anything halfway. Only four years old himself when their mother died, Dean had become six-month old Sam's caretaker and protector, and he had remained the one constant source of love and comfort Sam could rely on no matter how crazy their lives had become thereafter.

Whatever precipitated it, that kind of devotion tends to take on a life of its own. Dean would rather swallow razor blades than admit it, but his commitment to his younger brother ran as deep as his loyalty to his father. Although at times as he got older Sam resented the hell out of Dean's protectiveness with all the edgy volatility of his adolescent psyche, he understood and appreciated it as well.

But it created one hell of a paradox for Dean. Because Sam was not a child any more and was no longer willing to let his father have the last word on what was best for him, the very thing that Dean was bound to protect. The upshot was that Dean was being stretched to the breaking point between his father's demands and his brother's needs. His own need to keep his family together at all costs forced him into the role of go-between, a role that did not sit easily on a young man more inclined to action than words.

But he tried.

Sam knew how much he hated it when Sam and Dad fought, and suffered on the horns of his own dilemma as a result—hating to hurt his brother but needing to assert his independence from Dad. It was a messy, human problem with no solution in sight for any of them.

The empathy that sometimes felt like a curse reared up and Sam was overtaken by a wave of compassion for his older sibling—which he was careful not to show. If this "getting Sammy drunk" thing meant that much to Dean, Sam decided, he could postpone his report and go along with it.

Having made up his mind, Sam was surprised to feel a sudden twinge of excitement in the pit of his stomach. The idea of going out drinking with his big brother, like an equal, actually had its appeal. And putting one over on Dad, he admitted to himself, was just the icing on the cake.

"Okay," he conceded. "Okay, I'm in."

"Way to go, Sammy," Dean enthused. "I'm gonna go take a shower. We'll nuke a frozen pizza for dinner and then it's party time!"

As he stood in the shower scrubbing the sweat and dirt off his body, Dean bellowed snatches of classic rock favorites, enjoying the way his voice reverberated in the cramped shower stall. He had expected to have a lot more trouble convincing his little brother to fall in with his plans for the evening than he had. Sam was so focused on his schoolwork, something that Dean (secretly) admired but didn't really get. Still, he was a kid, and like any other kid he was bound to have thoughts of drinking and girls and driving fast cars floating around somewhere in that freaky smart brain of his. It was only natural.

But no way in hell was Dean going to let him get into any of that growing up stuff without having a hand in it himself. It was his job to protect his younger brother and that meant making sure that he was there to haul Sammy out if he got in over his head. If that meant he had to drag Sam kicking and screaming into the water, so to speak, himself, well, so be it. Besides, it was going to be just plain fun to get his serious little brother stinking drunk.

Dean grinned into the shower spray in anticipation of the evening ahead. This was going to be sweet.

An hour or so later, Sam followed his older brother out the door of the shabby apartment building. He started to circle around the right side of the building to the weed-strewn gravel patch that formed the tenant's parking lot, but Dean pulled him up short by the hood of his sweat jacket.

"Whoa, where you going, kiddo?" he asked.

Sam jerked away and glowered at Dean. "Aren't we taking the car?"

"What, are you kidding me? Getting drunk is one thing, but getting drunk and driving? You think I'd take a chance like that with my baby?"

Right. Dean's baby. The '67 Impala Dad had turned over to him just months before when he'd scored big in a poker game and bought a truck. Dean wouldn't think twice about breaking the law, or about risking his own neck (although to be fair he would think a lot more than twice about risking _Sam's_ neck), but heaven forbid he should do anything to put his precious car at risk. Ever since Dad had given the vehicle to him, Dean had sweet-talked and petted the Impala like he wouldn't be caught dead doing with a real, live person.

"So how are we getting to Dia's aunt and uncle's place?" Sam asked.

"Dia's picking us up. We'll get a cab home after."

"Doesn't she think this is kind of a weird idea for a date?"

"No, man," Dean laughed. "She's cool. She thinks it'll be fun. Besides, we're going out tomorrow night, too, and I'll make it up to her then." He leered at Sam to let him know exactly what "making it up to her" entailed.

Much to his self-disgust, Sam felt himself flush and he quickly looked away. He hated the tendency he had to redden when the subject of sex came up—and with Dean the subject came up frequently. Adolescence could be a bitch.

"There she is," Dean announced. "Perfect timing."

Sam looked up the street and saw an older model red Corolla heading their way. The car pulled up at the curb and Dia Mitchell grinned out at them from the driver's seat.

Dean had met Dia at the diner where she worked. The place was a popular hangout for the kids from their school. Not that Dean hung out with other kids much. For one thing, there was a lot of effort involved in keeping all the secrets required by the Winchester way of life, and it just wasn't worth the trouble. And for another, no place was home for very long. Dean didn't see the point in cultivating friendships if you were just going to be clearing out at a moment's notice.

But he did see the point in meeting girls, and the diner was a good place for that.

Dia (short for Lydia) Mitchell was not a student herself. She had graduated high school a few years ago and had been working at the diner ever since then, saving up money so that she could someday realize her dream of going to a real cooking school. The teenage boys swarmed around her like flies, attracted by her snappy humor, gamine looks and petite, shapely body. She enjoyed shooting the shit with them, but she drew the line at dating them.

For Dean, though, she made an exception. Sam was so used to Dean's success with girls that he had never really wondered at it. Even the age difference didn't seem strange. After all, Dean had been forced to grow up a lot faster than most kids. Not that he couldn't be annoyingly childish at times—mostly when he wanted to give Sam a hard time—but when all was said and done, he had lived a lot more than the other high school kids and Sam guessed it must show.

Sam had been in the diner a few times himself, either with Dean or with other kids from school. (Unlike his brother, Sam did at least try to make friends whenever it looked like they might stay somewhere for more than a week or two.) So he knew Dia. He had never spent much time talking to her, though, and now he was going to be in a situation where he could seriously embarrass himself in front of her. He sort of wished he had thought of that before he had agreed to Dean's program for the evening.

It was too late to back out now, though. Dean was already sliding into the front passenger seat next to the girl and jerked his head at Sam to climb in the back.

"Hey, Sam," Dia greeted him with a big grin as he complied. "Are you ready to do this thing?"

"Yeah," he mumbled. "Yeah, I guess."

As Dia pulled away from the curb, she felt Dean's warm hand sqeezing her knee through her tight jeans. She wrinkled her nose at him and he winked at her. Silly, but it gave her that going-downhill-on-a-roller-coaster feeling in her stomach and for a moment she regretted that they weren't going to be alone tonight.

Dia had plans for her life and at the moment they did not include getting hung up on some guy. But she was young and alive and a girl had to have a little fun along the way. Dean had turned out to be the ideal solution. He was funny, charming and totally hot. Best of all, he liked to have a good time without a lot of messy emotion getting in the way.

Dia glanced in the rearview mirror at Sam in the back seat. The two brothers didn't look all that much alike. She supposed they must take after different sides of the family. But Sam was a cutie in his own sort of awkward, teenager-y way. He wore his dark hair longish, with bangs hanging over his forehead, and he had big, soulful, soft brown eyes. He was on the thin side, but with a hint of wiry strength about him. Like most kids his age, he was kind of moody and sullen sometimes, but she knew he was basically a good kid. Dean obviously thought the world of him, even though he bitched about him as much as any other older brother. Dean didn't talk about his family or his past very much, but when he talked about Sam it was with an undercurrent of pride and protectiveness. Dia thought it was sweet that a tough guy like Dean had this big soft spot for his little brother.

When Dean had broached the idea to her that they take Sam along with them tonight and get him drunk, she had been intrigued. It certainly wouldn't be like any date she'd ever had before. She thought about her own first experience with booze, sneaking into her best friend's parents' liquor cabinet on a sleepover. Both of them wound up passed out on the family room floor. They had been _so_ sick and in _so_ much trouble when her friend's folks found them there the next morning. Still, it was an experience she wouldn't have wanted to miss. Tonight she and Dean were going to pass that experience along to Sam. There was something sort of epic about it, really—ushering a kid along the path to adulthood.

Dia giggled a little at the self-importance of that thought. Yeah, right. Mainly it was just going to be fun to watch the kid get plastered.

The apartment building where Dia's aunt and uncle lived was nothing fancy, but it was worlds above the near-tenement that made up the current Winchester domicile. The lobby was clean and smelled of nothing worse than disinfectant, the elevator actually worked, and the mailboxes were unbroken and neatly labeled.

The Hagerman apartment was on the fifth floor. Dia unlocked the door, flipped on the lights and led the boys into the living room. It was not a large room, but it was colorful and inviting. One wall was dominated by an entertainment center with a good-sized television and a decent stereo system. A couch and a couple of chairs were arranged facing it. Another wall contained a well-filled bookcase. Openings in the remaining two walls led to a small dining room and to a hall to the bedrooms.

A solid thump sounded from the direction of the dining room, heralding the appearance of an uncommonly large, long-haired black cat. It paused in the doorway and eyed Dean and Sam disdainfully before making a beeline for Dia.

"This is Damien," she announced, leaning over to scratch the beast's head as it wound in and out between her ankles. "He thinks he's the king of the jungle, but he's really just a big pussycat. Aren't you, sweetie pie?"

Dean grimaced as Dia babytalked the cat and rolled his eyes at Sam, but Sam watched the animal a little wistfully. Sam would have preferred a dog himself, but pets of any species were, of course, out of the question in the Winchester world.

"Let me feed this monster," Dia said. "You guys make yourselves at home. I'll be back in a minute with the fixings."

"Fixings for what?" Sam asked.

Dean grinned and wiggled an eyebrow at him. "You'll see, bro. You'll see."

Characteristically, Dean made a beeline for the stereo system and began checking out the selection, ignoring the CD's in their revolving rack and concentrating on a set of cassette tapes in a tray, while Sam turned to the bookcase.

"Sweet," Dean whistled after a moment. "I think I like these people. Look at this, Sammy. They've got Zeppelin, the Stones, Clapton…." He trailed off and busied himself with the system.

Moments after Zeppelin started blasting out of the speakers, Dia returned carrying a tray on which were balanced a bottle, several shot glasses, a container of grainy salt and a plastic bag full of limes. With a deftness born of several years waiting tables in the diner, she settled the tray on the coffee table in front of the couch and sat cross-legged on the floor before it.

"All right, guys," Dia announced. "Anybody up for tequila shots?"

It wasn't like Sam was a total virgin when it came to alcohol. He'd had a few beers and taken clandestine swigs from the bottles of whiskey his Dad sometimes left around in the aftermath of a hunt gone well…or badly. Mostly just from curiosity. (The beer was okay, the whiskey was kind of nasty.) But full on drinking with no other aim than getting shit-faced was something entirely new.

Dia and Dean coached him through the whole salt/tequila/lime ritual. The first shot burned all the way down. The second went down the wrong way and he choked, coughing some of the tequila out through his nose where it sizzled like acid in his nostrils.

Dean hammered him on the back. "Take it easy, Tiger," he cautioned, grinning. "It ain't a race."

"I know," Dia piped up. "Let's play a drinking game. My aunt's bound to have some cards around here somewhere. She's into bridge big time."

"What'd you have in mind?" Dean asked, smirking at her.

There went that flush again. Or maybe, Sam thought, it was just the booze making him feel so warm.

"Behave yourself, Dean," Dia chided. After a few minutes digging through the drawers of a chest at the near end of the hallway, she came up waving a deck of cards triumphantly. "Poker. Five card draw. Losers have to take a shot; winner gets to choose."

Sam was pretty good at poker. Dean was better. Dad had taught them both and he was a master, but Dean was almost up to his standard. From their father's point of view, it was a vital skill. Poker was one of the ways the bills got paid—along with pool hustling, credit card fraud and a few other less than legal activities. As far as he could tell, Sam was the only one who ever had qualms about it.

Seven hands in and six shots later, Sam noticed that the pips on the cards didn't seem to want to stay in one place and sometimes the digits on the cards didn't match the number of pips he thought he could count. It was getting harder and harder to manipulate the colored toothpicks they were using to place bets as well. And the floor underneath his legs kept wanting to tilt under him like the deck of a ship in a storm.

"Sam," Dean's voice penetrated the growing fog in Sam's head. "Sammy? Your bet, man."

"Huh? Oh, okay, uh…" What was it they were doing? Oh, yeah, poker. Wait, how come he had so many cards in his hand…

"Oooh, Dean," another voice joined in, higher pitched, a little slurred. "I think he's gone to tequila la-la land. Oops, I think I have, too."

Sam looked up through bleary eyes and saw (two? of) Dia clambering into Dean's lap. This time he didn't flush, though, because his face had gone totally numb. He felt himself tipping backward and was vaguely grateful that the couch was behind him to prevent an undignified sprawl on the floor.

Something soft brushed against his cheek, startling him, and he caught a glimpse of fuzzy black bulk out of the corner of his eye. For a split second he thought maybe Dia's aunt and uncle had a poltergeist or a dead former tenant in their apartment, but then he realized it was just the cat jumping up onto the couch behind him. This struck him as hilariously funny, but before he could open his mouth to share the joke with Dean, a noise like a buzzsaw roared in his ears and the room started to flicker before his eyes like a computer with a bad video card. And then he was somewhere else entirely…

A room. Well, okay, that made sense. But it wasn't a room Sam remembered ever seeing before. Not that he could really see it all that well to begin with. The lighting was dim, and the space kept blurring in and out of focus. He had an impression of chairs, a table, some sort of cabinet with bottles on the top. And…was that really a dress hung on the wall like a weird piece of art?

But it wasn't until he actually tried to look around at the rest of the room that he became aware that he wasn't just in a strange room. He was in a strange body. And he didn't have any control over it either, couldn't make it move the way he wanted. In fact, it seemed to be pursuing a course of its own, just bearing him along as a passenger, like a traveler peering out the windows of a moving train.

Which was just too weird.

Then he realized that he—or rather this body he was apparently hitching a ride in—was not alone. A man stood in front of him, so close he could see the color of his eyes, hazel, and the light smattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks. There was something tantalizingly familiar about the man, even though he could not remember ever having seen him before any more than he had the room. His host, for want of a better word, was looking slightly down at the man, and had its (his?) hands knotted in the collar of the man's jacket.

Someone spoke. Not the man in front of him, so it had to be his host. The words were a little slurred, run together, as if his host, too, had drunk one too many tequila shots. He said…

"Dean, Dad told you to do it. You have to."

_Wait, Dean? His Dean? No, it couldn't be. It wasn't possible. This was a grown man with maybe as much as a decade on his 18-year old brother, a man with a coiled and dangerous stillness in his body and old pain in his eyes_.

_But they were, yes, they were Dean's eyes, in Dean's face. So familiar and so strange. And what? What did_ _Dad tell you to do?_

"Yeah, well Dad's an ass," the man replied sharply. "He never should have said anything. I mean you don't do that. You don't lay that kind of crap on your kids."

_And no, again. This couldn't be Dean, his brother Dean. Couldn't be. Dean would never talk like that about Dad. No way_.

_But Dad had laid crap on his kids before. Sam knew it, even if Dean refused to see it. He had laid heavy burdens on both of them in his obsessive quest for revenge and some illusion of safety. What kind of crap had he laid on this older Dean that was bad enough to make him so angry?_

"No, he was right to say it," his host argued. "Who knows what I might become? Even now everyone around me dies."

_If the other man really was Dean, then the host pretty much had to be Sam himself—some older, taller, version of Sam, grown up to match this grown up Dean. But that didn't make sense either, did it? Because that meant everything was all turned upside down and it was Sam arguing that Dad was in the right about…whatever it was._

_What I might become? What does that mean? And who had died…besides Mom?_

"Well, I'm not dying," Dean insisted. "Okay? And neither are you. Come on, sit down."

A moment of dizziness and disorientation ensued, an earthquake shaking his vantage point as his brother took the other Sam by the arms and pushed him down on what he supposed must be a bed. Dean started to step back, but Sam's older self reached for him, held him in place.

"No, please, Dean. You're the only one who can do it. Promise." The voice was still slurry, but pleading, desperate.

_I don't understand. Promise what?_

"Don't ask that of me." Dean's voice was not loud or strident, not demanding, not even pleading, but Sam could hear the weariness and hurt bleeding out from beneath the quiet words.

_This can't be me. I wouldn't do anything to hurt Dean. I wouldn't. He's my brother. What the fuck is going on here? _

But his older self went on, inexorably. "Dean, please. You have to promise me."

And Dean stared into his face for a long moment before answering in a voice still soft but etched deep with anger and pain and a sort of bitter helplessness. "I promise."

"Thanks," older Sam choked out. "Thank you."

Sam saw his older self's hands reaching up to his brother, but whatever would have come next was lost as the buzzsaw noise and the flickering returned and the strange room began to spin around him and fade away and then he was back in the Hagerman apartment, sitting on the floor with his back against the couch, woozy and perplexed, and his brother was practically in his face, shaking him….

"Sam? Sammy? Hey, man, are you still with us?" Dean's voice blended concern and amusement.

He blinked, trying to clear his eyes as Dean swam in and out of focus, Dia peering over the older boy's shoulder, giggling. For a split second, another face interposed itself over his brother's familiar visage. Someone older, harder, aged and honed by harsh experience but still recognizable as someone he loved. He reached after a memory tied to that face, but it went spinning away into what was yet to be before he could grasp it.

"Here you go, little bro," Dean said, pushing something into his hands. "I think you might be needing this."

Sam looked down into the empty wastebasket, the depths of which seemed to be spiraling like a top into some unimaginable abyss. And that was when he knew that he was going to be extravagantly, epically, sick.

And he was.

Sam was awakened by sunlight painted across his face and prickling his eyelids. That didn't feel right at all and he dragged his body around in the bed so he could peer at the clock on the bed table. According to the clock it was nearly 11:00 a.m. Sam laid still another moment trying to figure out what he was doing in bed at 11 o'clock in the morning. And then last night came back to him with the answer.

Dean and Dia. The aunt and uncle's apartment. The cat, the cards, the tequila shots. Getting drunk, getting sick. (and god, how embarrassing was that; he'd never be able to look Dia in the face again). Dean half carrying him out to the cab and the disjointed ride home. And something else, something in the corner of his mind that flickered away as soon as he tried to focus on it. Probably nothing important—just some drunken fancy or other.

Sam sat up slowly in the bed, expecting to feel wrecked. But surprisingly he didn't feel that bad. He had a dull headache and a vague queasiness in the pit of his stomach—that was all. He'd seen Dad and Dean hung over enough times to realize he could be a lot worse off. Maybe it was the result of having already puked up everything in his stomach the night before. He also seemed to remember Dean plying him with orange juice and aspirin before letting him peel out of his clothes and fall into bed.

Speaking of Dean… His brother's bed was not only empty but actually made up. Before Sam could get up and go looking for him, however, the bedroom door opened softly and Dean peered in at him.

"You're awake," he noted unnecessarily. "How ya doin', Sammy? Feelin' okay?"

"Yeah," Sam answered. "Not too bad. Why'd you let me sleep so late?"

"Figured you could use it after that marathon puking you did last night." Dean grinned crookedly. "That was pretty awesome, dude."

"Glad _you_ enjoyed it," Sam responded sarcastically.

"Don't sweat it, bro," Dean advised. "It goes with the territory. Man, you shoulda seen me the first time I got that wasted. I was drinking cheap-ass whiskey and some off-brand cola. I spent most of the night praying to the porcelain god. I would've gladly paid someone to shoot me and put me out of my misery. You got off light."

"Yeah, well, didn't feel like it to me," Sam said pointedly.

Dean's grin faded. "Look, Sammy, I'm sorry if it was a bad scene for you. I really wanted you to have a good time."

"It's okay, Dean," Sam replied quickly, not liking the uncharacteristically vulnerable expression on Dean's face. "I did have a good time."

To his surprise, Sam found that he meant that. Maybe a little bit of it was about making Dean feel better, but looking back on it, he realized that they had just added a good memory—a memory of two brothers doing something normal together, something that didn't end in fire or blood or monsters—to the fairly small stash of those their lives had afforded to date. Who knew what the future was going to bring to either of them? He didn't like to think about that too much, because he had a feeling a lot of it was going to be bad and whether he found a way to make his escape or not, he and Dean both had some rough times ahead.

He met his brother's anxious gaze and smiled. "I'm glad we did it."

"Awesome!" Dean exclaimed, confidence restored. The older boy leapt onto his bed, crossed his ankles and leaned back on the headboard, contemplating the ceiling thoughtfully. "So, the way I figure it, now that that's out of the way, the next thing we gotta do is see about getting you laid…."


End file.
